The beast in the jungle

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THE BEAST IN
THE JUNGLE

UNIFORM EDITION
OF THE TALES

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

THE ASPERN PAPERS

DAISY MILLER

THE LESSON OF THE MASTER

THE DEATH OF THE LION

THE COXON FUND

THE REVERBERATOR

THE BEAST IN
THE JUNGLE

BY HENRY JAMES

LONDON : MARTIN SECKER

NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

a
8*3

This edliion first published 1915

The text follows that of th

Definitive Edition

WHAT determined the speech that startled him
in the course of their encounter scarcely matters,
being probably but some words spoken by him
self quite without intention spoken as they
lingered and slowly moved together after their
renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed
by friends an hour or two before to the house at
which she was staying ; the party of visitors at
the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks
to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was
lost in the crowd, had been invited over to
luncheon. There had been after luncheon much
dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive,
a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things,
intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of
all the arts, that made the place almost famous ;
and the great rooms were so numerous that guests
could wander at their will, hang back from the
principal group and in cases where they took such
matters with the last seriousness give themselves
up to mysterious appreciations and measurements.
There were persons to be observed, singly or in

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way
corners with their hands on their knees and their
heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an
excited sense of smell. When they were two they
either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into
silences of even deeper import, so that there were
aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much
the air of the "look round," previous to a sale highly
advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be,
the dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisi
tion at Weatherend would have had to be wild
indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among
such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by
the presence of those who knew too much and
by that of those who knew nothing. The great
rooms caused so much poetry and history to press
upon him that he needed some straying apart to
feel in a proper relation with them, though this
impulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of
some of his companions, to be compared to the
movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had
an issue promptly enough in a direction that was
not to have been calculated.

It led, briefly, in the course of the October
afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram,
whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remem
brance, as they sat much separated at a very long
table, had begun merely by troubling him rather
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

pleasantly. It affected him as the sequel of
something of which he had lost the beginning.
He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it,
as a continuation, but did n't know what it con
tinued, which was an interest or an amusement
the greater as he was also somehow aware yet
without a direct sign from her that the young
woman herself had n't lost the thread. She
had n't lost it, but she would n't give it back to
him, he saw, without some putting forth of his
hand for it ; and he not only saw that, but saw
several things more, things odd enough in the
light of the fact that at the moment some accident
of grouping brought them face to face he was still
merely fumbling with the idea that any contact
between them in the past would have had no
importance. If it had had no importance he
scarcely knew why his actual impression of her
should so seem to have so much ; the answer to
which, however, was that in such a life as they all
appeared to be leading for the moment one could
but take things as they came. He was satisfied,
without in the least being able to say why, that
this young lady might roughly have ranked in the
house as a poor relation ; satisfied also that she
was not there on a brief visit, but was more or
less a part of the establishment almost a
working, a remunerated part. Did n't she enjoy

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at periods a protection that she paid for by
helping, among other services, to show the place
and explain it, deal with the tiresome people,
answer questions about the dates of the building,
the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the
pictures, the favourite haunts of the ghost ? It
was n't that she looked as if you could have given
her shillings it was impossible to look less so.
Yet when she finally drifted toward him, dis
tinctly handsome, though ever so much older
older than when he had seen her before it
might have been as an effect of her guessing that
he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more
imagination to her than to all the others put
together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind
of truth that the others were too stupid for. She
was there on harder terms than any one ; she
was there as a consequence of things suffered,
one way and another, in the interval of years ;
and she remembered him very much as she was
remembered only a good deal better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech
they were alone in one of the rooms remarkable
for a fine portrait over the chimney-place out
of which their friends had passed, and the charm
of it was that even before they had spoken they
had practically arranged with each other to stay
behind for talk. The charm, happily, was in
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

other things too partly in there being scarce a
spot at Weatherend without something to stay
behind for. It was in the way the autumn day
looked into the high windows as it waned ; the
way the red light, breaking at the close from under
a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and
played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold,
old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the way
she came to him as if, since she had been turned
on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should
he choose to keep the whole thing down, just take
her mild attention for a part of her general busi
ness. As soon as he heard her voice, however,
the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied ;
the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its
advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there
before her. " I met you years and years ago in
Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed
to disappointment she had been so sure he
did n't ; and to prove how well he did he began
to pour forth the particular recollections that
popped up as he called for them. Her face and
her voice, all at his service now, worked the
miracle the impression operating like the torch
of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by
one, a long row of gas-jets. Marcher flattered
himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was
really still more pleased on her showing him, with

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

amusement, that in his haste to make everything
right he had got most things rather wrong. It
had n't been at Rome it had been at Naples ;
and it had n't been eight years before it had
been more nearly ten. She had n't been, either,
with her uncle and aunt, but with her mother and
brother ; in addition to which it was not with the
Pembles he had been, but with the Boyers, coming
down in their company from Rome a point on
which she insisted, a little to his confusion, and
as to which she had her evidence in hand. The
Boyers she had known, but did n't know the
Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it
was the people he was with who had made them
acquainted. The incident of the thunderstorm
that had raged round them with such violence as
to drive them for refuge into an excavation
this incident had not occurred at the Palace of
the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when
they had been present there at an important
find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her
corrections, though the moral of them was, she
pointed out, that he really did n't remember the
least thing about her ; and he only felt it as a
drawback that when all was made strictly historic
there did n't appear much of anything left. They
lingered together still, she neglecting her office
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

for from the moment he was so clever she had no
proper right to him and both neglecting the
house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two
more would n't again breathe on them. It had n't
taken them many minutes, after all, to put down
on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that
constituted their respective hands ; only what
came out was that the pack was unfortunately not
perfect that the past, invoked, invited, en
couraged, could give them, naturally, no more
than it had. It had made them anciently meet
her at twenty, him at twenty-five ; but nothing
was so strange, they seemed to say to each other,
as that, while so occupied, it had n't done a little
more for them. They looked at each other as
with the feeling of an occasion missed ; the
present would have been so much better if the
other, in the far distance, in the foreign land,
had n't been so stupidly meagre. There were n't,
apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little
old things that had succeeded in coming to pass
between them ; trivialities of youth, simplicities
of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible
germs, but too deeply buried too deeply (did n't
it seem ?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher
could only feel he ought to have rendered her
some service saved her from a capsized boat
in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag,

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

filched from her cab in the streets of Naples by
a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would have been
nice if he could have been taken with fever all
alone at his hotel, and she could have come to
look after him, to write to his people, to drive
him out in convalescence. Then they would be
in possession of the something or other that their
actual show seemed to lack. It yet somehow
presented itself, this show, as too good to be
spoiled ; so that they were reduced for a few
minutes more to wondering a little helplessly
why since they seemed to know a certain
number of the same people their reunion had
been so long averted. They did n't use that name
for it, but their delay from minute to minute to
join the others was a kind of confession that they /-
did n't quite want it to be a failure.
attempted supposition of reasons for their not
having met but showed how little they knew of
each other. There came in fact a moment when
Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to
pretend she was an old friend, for all the com
munities were wanting, in spite of which it was
as an old friend that he saw she would have suited
him. He had new ones enough was surrounded
with them for instance on the stage of the other
house ; as a new one he probably would n't have
so much as noticed her. He would have liked to
12

invent something, get her to make-believe with
him that some passage of a romantic or critical
kind had originally occurred. He was really
almost reaching out in imagination as against
time for something that would do, and saying
to himself that if it did n't come this sketch of
a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly
bungled. They would separate, and now for no
second or no third chance. They would have
tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the
turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself,
that, everything else failing, she herself decided
to take up the case and, as it~~were, save the
situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that she
had been consciously keeping back what she said
and hoping to get on without it ; a scruple in
her that immensely touched him when, by the
end of three or four minutes more, he was able
to measure it. What she brought out, at any
rate, quite cleared the air and supplied the link
the link it was so odd he should frivolously have
managed to lose.

" You know you told me something I 've never
forgotten and that again and again has made me
think of you since ; it was that tremendously hot
day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay,
for the breeze. What I allude to was what you
said to me, on the way back, as we sat under the

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

awning of the boat enjoying the cool. Have you
forgotten ? "

He had forgotten, and was even more surprised
than ashamed. But the great thing was that he
saw in this no vulgar reminder of any " sweet "
speech. The vanity of women had long memories,
but she was making no claim on him of a com
pliment or a mistake. With another woman, a
totally different one, he might have feared the
recall possibly even some imbecile " offer." So,
in having to say that he had indeed forgotten,
he was conscious rather of a loss than of a gain ;
he already saw an interest in the matter of her
mention. " I try to think but I give it up.
Yet I remember the Sorrento day."

" I'm not very sure you do," May Bartram
after a moment said ; " and I'm not very sure
I ought to want you to. It 's dreadful to bring a
person back at any time to what he was ten years
before. If you 've lived away from it," she smiled,
" so much the better."

" Ah if you have n't why should I ? " he
asked.

" Lived away, you mean, from what I myself
was ? "

" From what I was. I was of course an ass,"
Marcher went on ; " but I would rather know
from you just the sort of ass I was than from
14

the moment you have something in your mind
not know anything."

Still, however, she hesitated. " But if you 've
completely ceased to be that sort ? "

" Why I can then all the more bear to know.
Besides, perhaps I have n't."

" Perhaps. Yet if you have n't," she added,
" I should suppose you 'd remember. Not indeed
that / in the least connect with my impression
the invidious name you use. If I had only thought
you foolish," she explained, " the tiling I speak
of would n't so have remained with me. It was
about yourself." She waited as if it might come
to him ; but as, only meeting her eyes in wonder,
he gave no sign, she burnt her ships. " Has it
ever happened ? "

Then it was that, while he continued to stare,
a light broke for him and the blood slowly came
to his face, which began to burn with recognition.

" Do you mean I told you ? " But he

faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be
right, lest he should only give himself away.

" It was something about yourself that it was
natural one should n't forget that is if one
remembered you at all. That 's why I ask you,"
she smiled, " if the thing you then spoke of has
ever come to pass ? "

Oh then he saw, but he was lost hi wonder and

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found himself embarrassed. This, he also saw,
made her sorry for him, as if her allusion had been
a mistake. It took him but a moment, however,
to feel it had n't been, much as it had been a
surprise. After the first little shock of it her
knowledge on the contrary began, even if rather
strangely, to taste sweet to him. She was the
only other person in the world then who would
have it, and she had had it all these years, while
the fact of his having so breathed his secret had
unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they
could n't have met as if nothing had happened.
" I judge," he finally said, " that I know what
you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost any
sense of having taken you so far into my con
fidence."

" Is it because you 've taken so many others as
well ? "

" I 've taken nobody. Not a creature since
then."

" So that I 'm the only person who knows ? "

" The only person in the world."

" Well," she quickly replied, " I myself have
never spoken. I 've never, never repeated of you
what you told me." She looked at him so that
he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over
it in such a way that he was without a doubt
" And I never will."
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost
excessive, put him at ease about her possible
derision. Somehow the whole question was a
new luxury to him that is from the moment
she was in possession. If she did n't take the
sarcastic view she clearly took the sympathetic,
and that was what he had had, in all the long
time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was
that he could n't at present have begun to tell
her, and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by
the accident of having done so of old. " Please
don't then. We 're just right as it is."

" Oh I am," she laughed, " if you are ! " To
which she added : " Then you do still feel in the
same way ? "

It was impossible he should n't take to himself
that she was really interested, though it all kept
coming as a perfect surprise. He had thought of
himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he
was n't alone a bit. He had n't been, it appeared,
for an hour since those moments on the Sorrento
boat. It was she who had been, he seemed to see
as he looked at her she who had been made so
by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity. To
tell her what he had told her what had it been
but to ask something of her ? something that she
had given, in her charity, without his having, by
a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing
B 17

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

another encounter, so much as thanked her.
What he had asked of her had been simply at first
not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not
done so for ten years, and she was not doing so
now. So he had endless gratitude to make up.
Only for that he must see just how he had figured
to her. " What, exactly, was the account I
gave ? "

" Of the way you did feel ? Well, it was very
simple. You said you had had from your earliest
time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense
of being kept for something rare and strange,
possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner
or later to happen to you, that you had in your
bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and
that would perhaps overwhelm you."

" Do you call that very simple ? " John
Marcher asked.

She thought a moment. " It was perhaps
because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand
it."

" You do understand it ? " he eagerly asked.

Again she kept her kind eyes on him. " You
still have the belief ? "

" Oh ! " he exclaimed helplessly. There was
too much to say.

" Whatever it 's to be," she clearly made out,
" it has n't yet come."
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

He shook his head in complete surrender now.
" It has n't yet come. Only, you know, it is n't
anything I 'm to do, to achieve in the world, to
be distinguished or admired for. I 'm not such
an ass as that. It would be much better, no
doubt, if I were."

" It 's to be something you 're merely to suffer ? "

" Well, say to wait for to have to meet, to
face, to see suddenly break out in my life ; possibly
destroying all further consciousness, possibly
annihilating me ; possibly, on the other hand,
only altering everything, striking at the root of
all my world and leaving me to the consequences,
however they shape themselves."

She took this in, but the light in her eyes con
tinued for him not to be that of mockery. " Is n't
what you describe perhaps but the expectation
or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so
many people of falling in love ? "

John Marcher thought. " Did you ask me
that before ? "

"No I was n't so free-and-easy then. But
it 's what strikes me now."

" Of course," he said after a moment, " it
strikes you. Of course it strikes me. Of course
what 's in store for me may be no more than that.
The only thing is," he went on, " that I think if
it had been that I should by this time know."

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Do you mean because you 've been in love ? "
And then as he but looked at her in silence :
" You Ve been in love, and it has n't meant such
a cataclysm, has n't proved the great affair ? "

" Here I am, you see. It has n't been over
whelming."

" Then it has n't been love," said May Bartram.

" Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for
that I Ve taken it till now. It was agreeable,
it was delightful, it was miserable," he explained.
" But it was n't strange. It was n't what my
affair 's to be."

" You want something all to yourself some
thing that nobody else knows or has known ? "

" It is n't a question of what I ' want ' God
knows I don't want anything. It 's only a question
of the apprehension that haunts me that I live
with day by day."

He said this so lucidly and consistently that he
could see it further impose itself. If she had n't been
interested before she 'd have been interested now.

" Is it a sense of coming violence ? "

Evidently now too again he liked to talk of
it. " I don't think of it as when it does come
necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural
and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think
of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itself
appear natural."
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Then how will it appear strange ? "

Marcher bethought himself. " It won't to
me."

" To whom then ? "

" Well," he replied, smiling at last, " say to
you."

" Oh then I 'm to be present ? "

" Why you are present since you know."

" I see." She turned it over. " But I mean
at the catastrophe."

At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way
to their gravity ; it was as if the long look
they exchanged held them together. " It will
only depend on yourself if you '11 watch with
me."

" Are you afraid ? " she asked.

" Don't leave me wozo," he went on.

" Are you afraid ? " she repeated.

" Do you think me simply out of my mind ? "
he pursued instead of answering. " Do I merely
strike you as a harmless lunatic ? "

" No," said May Bartram. " I understand
you. I believe you."

" You mean you feel how my obsession poor
old thing may correspond to some possible
reality ? "

" To some possible reality."

" Then you will watch with me ? "

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

She hesitated, then for the third time put her
question. " Are you afraid ? "

" Did I tell you I was at Naples ? "

" No, you said nothing about it."

" Then I don't know. And I should like to
know," said John Marcher. " You '11 tell me
yourself whether you think so. If you '11 watch
with me you '11 see."

" Very good then." They had been moving
by this time across the room, and at the door,
before passing out, they paused as for the full
wind-up of their understanding. " I '11 watch
with you," said May Bartram.

22

II

THE fact that she " knew " knew and yet
neither chaffed him nor betrayed him had in
a short time begun to constitute between them
a goodly bond, which became more marked when,
within the year that followed their afternoon at
Weatherend, the opportunities for meeting multi
plied. The event that thus promoted these
occasions was the death of the ancient lady her
great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her
mother, she had to such an extent found shelter,
and who, though but the widowed mother of the
new successor to the property, had succeeded
thanks to a high tone and a high temper in
not forfeiting the supreme position at the great
house. The deposition of this personage arrived
but with her death, which, followed by many
changes, made in particular a difference for the
young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention
had recognised from the first a dependent with a
pride that might ache though it did n't bristle.
Nothing for a long time had made him easier
than the thought that the aching must have been

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THE BEAST IN THEJUNGLE

much soothed by Miss Bartram's now finding her
self able to set up a small home in London. She
had acquired property, to an amount that made
that luxury just possible, under her aunt's
extremely complicated will, and when the whole
matter began to be straightened out, which indeed
took time, she let him know that the happy issue
was at last in view. He had seen her again
before that day, both because she had more than
once accompanied the ancient lady to town and
because he had paid another visit to the friends
who so conveniently made of Weatherend one
of the charms of their own hospitality. These
friends had taken him back there ; he had
achieved there again with Miss Bartram some
quiet detachment ; and he had in London suc
ceeded in persuading her to more than one brief
absence from her aunt. They went together, on
these latter occasions, to the National Gallery
and the South Kensington Museum, where, among
vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large
not now attempting to recover, as at first, the
taste of their youth and their ignorance. That
recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its
purpose well, had given them quite enough ; so that
they were, to Marcher's sense, no longer hovering
about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt
their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

They were literally afloat together ; for our
gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as
that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried
treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own
hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light
that is to within reach of the dim day constituted
by their discretions and privacies the object
of value the hiding-place of which he had, after
putting it into the ground himself, so strangely,
so long forgotten. The rare luck of his having
again just stumbled on the spot made him in
different to any other question ; he would doubt
less have devoted more time to the odd accident
of his lapse of memory if he had n't been moved
to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort,
as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself
had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered
into his plan that any one should " know ", and
mainly for the reason that it was n't in liim to
tell any one. That would have been impossible,
for nothing but the amusement of a cold world
would have waited on it. Since, however, a
mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes,
in spite of him, he would count that a compensa
tion and profit by it to the utmost. That the
right person should know tempered the asperity
of his secret more even than his shyness had per
mitted him to imagine ; and May Bartram was

25

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

clearly right, because well, because there she
was. Her knowledge simply settled it ; he would
have been sure enough by this time had she been
wrong. There was that in his situation, no doubt,
that disposed him too much to see her as a mere
confidant, taking all her light for him from the
fact the fact only of her interest in his pre
dicament ; from her mercy, sympathy, serious
ness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest
of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for
him was just in her giving him this constant sense
of his being admirably spared, he was careful to
remember that she had also a life of her own,
with things that might happen to her, things that
in friendship one should likewise take account of.
Something fairly remarkable came to pass with
him, for that matter, in this connexion some
thing represented by a certain passage of his
consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one
extreme to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody
knew, the most disinterested person in the world,
carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual
suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about
it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect
upon his life, asking of them no allowance and
only making on his side all those that were asked.
He had n't disturbed people with the queerness
26

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

of their having to know a haunted man, though
he had had moments of rather special temptation
on hearing them say they were forsooth " un
settled." If they were as unsettled as he was
he who had never been settled for an hour in his
life they would know what it meant. Yet it
was n't, all the same, for him to make them, and
he listened to them civilly enough. This was why
he had such good though possibly such rather
colourless manners ; this was why, above all,
he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as
decently as in fact perhaps even a little
sublimely unselfish. Our point is accordingly
that he valued this character quite sufficiently to
measure his present danger of letting it lapse,
against which he promised himself to be much
on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less,
to be selfish just a little, since surely no more
charming occasion for it had come to him. " Just
a little," in a word, was just as much as Miss
Bartram, taking one day with another, would let
him. He never would be in the least coercive,
and would keep well before him the lines on
which consideration for her the very highest
ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish
the heads under which her affairs, her require
ments, her peculiarities he went so far as to
give them the latitude of that name would

27

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

come into their intercourse. All this naturally
was a sign of how much he took the intercourse
itself for granted. There was nothing more to be
done about that. It simply existed ; had sprung
into being with her first penetrating question to
him in the autumn light there at Weatherend.
The real form it should have taken on the basis
that stood out large was the form of their marry
ing. But the devil in this was that the very basis
itself put marrying out of the question. His
conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, hi
short, was n't a privilege he could invite a woman
to share ; and that consequence of it was precisely
what was the matter with him. Something or
other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the
turns of the montlis and the years, like a crouching
Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether
the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or
to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable
spring of the creature ; and the definite lesson
from that was that a man of feeling did n't cause
himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-
hunt. Such was the image under which he had
ended by figuring his life.

They had at first, none the less, in the scattered
hours spent together, made no allusion to that
view of it ; which was a sign he was handsomely
alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in
28

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

fact did n't care, always to be talking about it.
Such a feature in one's outlook was really like a
hump on one's back. The difference it made
every minute of the day existed quite inde
pendently of discussion. One discussed of course
like a hunchback, for there was always, if nothing
else, the hunchback face. That remained, and
she was watching him ; but people watched best,
as a general thing, in silence, so that such would
be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet
he did n't want, at the same time, to be tense and
solemn ; tense and solemn was what he imagined
he too much showed for with other people. The
thing to be, with the one person who knew, was
easy and natural to make the reference rather
than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather
than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any
case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic
and portentous. Some such consideration as the
latter was doubtless in his mind for instance when
he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps
the great thing he had so long felt as in the lap
of the gods was no more than this circumstance,
which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a
house in London. It was the first allusion they
had yet again made, needing any other hitherto
so little ; but when she replied, after having given
him the news, that she was by no means satisfied

29

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

with such a trifle as the climax to so special a
suspense, she almost set him wondering if she
had n't even a larger conception of singularity for
him than he had for himself. He was at all events
destined to become aware little by little, as time
went by, that she was all the while looking at his
life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of the
thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with
the consecration of the years, never mentioned
between them save as " the real truth " about
him. That had always been his own form of
reference to it, but she adopted the form so
quietly that, looking back at the end of a period,
he knew there was no moment at which it was
traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside
his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully
indulging for that of still more beautifully believing
him.

It was always open to him to accuse her of
seeing him but as the most harmless of maniacs,
and this, in the long run since it covered so
much ground was his easiest description of
their friendship. He had a screw loose for her
but she liked him in spite of it and was practically,
against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper,
unremuncrated but fairly amused and, in the
absence of other near ties, not disreputably
occupied. The rest of the world of course thought
30

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and
above all why, queer ; which was precisely what
enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the
right folds. She took his gaiety from him
since it had to pass with them for gaiety as
she took everything else ; but she certainly so far
justified by her unerring touch his finer sense of
the degree to which he had ended by convincing
her. She at least never spoke of the secret of
his life except as " the real truth about you," and
she had in fact a wonderful way of making it
seem, as such, the secret of her own life too. That
was in fine how he so constantly felt her as allow
ing for him ; he could n't on the whole call it
anything else. He allowed for himself, but she,
exactly, allowed still more ; partly because,
better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced
his unhappy perversion through reaches of its
course into which he could scarce follow it. He
knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she
knew how he looked as well ; he knew each of the
things of importance he was insidiously kept from
doing, but she could add up the amount they
made, understand how much, with a lighter
weight on his spirit, he might have done, and
thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell
short. Above all she was in the secret of the
difference between the forms he went through

31

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

those of his little office under Government, those
of caring for his modest patrimony, for his library,
for his garden in the country, for the people in
London whose invitations he accepted and repaid
and the detachment that reigned beneath them
and that made of all behaviour, all that could in
the least be called behaviour, a long act of dis
simulation. What it had come to was that he
wore a mask painted with the social simper, out
of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an
expression not in the least matching the other
features. This the stupid world, even after years,
had never more than half discovered. It was only
May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an
art indescribable, the feat of at once or perhaps
it was only alternately meeting the eyes from in
front and mingling her own vision, as from over
his shoulder, with their peep through the apertures.
So while they grew older together she did watch
with him, and so she let this association give shape
and colour to her own existence. Beneath her
forms as well detachment had learned to sit,
and behaviour had become for her, in the social
sense, a false account of herself. There was but
one account of her that would have been true all
the while and that she could give straight to
nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole
attitude was a virtual statement, but the per-
32

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

ception of that only seemed called to take its
place for him as one of the many things necessarily
crowded out of his consciousness. If she had
moreover, like himself, to make sacrifices to their
real truth, it was to be granted that her com
pensation might have affected her as more prompt
and more natural. They had long periods, in
this London time, during which, when they were
together, a stranger might have listened to them
without in the least pricking up his ears ; on the
other hand the real truth was equally liable at
any moment to rise to the surface, and the auditor
would then have wondered indeed what they were
talking about. They had from an early hour
made up their mind that society was, luckily,
unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by
this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
Yet there were still moments when the situation
turned almost fresh usually under the effect
of some expression drawn from herself. Her
expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but
her intervals were generous. " What saves us,
you know, is that we answer so completely to
so usual an appearance : that of the man and
woman whose friendship has become such a daily
habit or almost as to be at last indispens
able." That for instance was a remark she had
frequently enough had occasion to make, though
c 33

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

she had given it at different times different
developments. What we are especially con
cerned with is I he turn it happened to take from
her one afternoon when he had come to see her
in honour of her birthday. This anniversary had
fallen on a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and
general outward gloom ; but he had brought her
his customary offering, having known her now
long enough to have established a hundred small
traditions. It was one of his proofs to himself,
the present he made her on her birthday, that
he had n't sunk into real selfishness. It was
mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it
was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly
careful to pay for it more than he thought he
could afford. " Our habit saves you, at least,
don't you sec ? because it makes you, after all,
for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men.
What 's the most inveterate mark of men in
general ? Why the capacity to spend endless
time with dull women to spend it I won't say
without being bored, but without minding that
they are, without being driven off at a tangent
by it ; which comes to the same thing. I 'm
your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for
which you pray at church. That covers your
tracks more than anything."

" And what covers yours ? " asked Marcher,
34

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

whom his dull woman could mostly to this extent
amuse. " I see of course what you mean by
your saving me, in this way and that, so far as
other people are concerned I 've seen it all
along. Only what is it that saves you ? I often
think, you know, of that."

She looked as if she sometimes thought of that
too, but rather in a different way. " Where other
people, you mean, are concerned ? "

" Well, you 're really so in with me, you know
as a sort of result of my being so in with your
self. I mean of my having such an immense
regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of
all you 've done for me. I sometimes ask myself
if it 's quite fair. Fair I mean to have so involved
and since one may say it interested you.
I almost feel as if you had n't really had time to
do anything else."

" Anything else but be interested ? " she asked.
" Ah what else does one ever want to be ? .If
I 've been ' watching ' with you, as we long ago
agreed I was to do, watching 's always in itself
an absorption."

" Oh certainly," John Marcher said, " if you

had n't had your curiosity ! Only does n't

it sometimes come to you as time goes on that
your curiosity is n't being particularly repaid ? "

May Bartram had a pause. " Do you ask that,

35

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

by any chance, because yon feel at all that yours
is n't ? I mean because you have to wait so
long."

Oh he understood what she meant ! " For the
thing to happen that never does happen ? For
the Beast to jump out ? No, I 'm just where
I was about it. It is n't a matter as to which
I can choose, I can decide for a change. It is n't
one as to which there can be a change. It 's in
the lap of the gods. One 's in the hands of one's
law there one is. As to the form the law will take,
the way it will operate, that 's its own affair."

" Yes," Miss Bartram replied ; " of coui'se one's
fate 's coming, of course it has come in its own
form and its own way, all the while. Only, you
know, the form and the way in your case were
to have been well, something so exceptional
and, as one may say, so particularly your own."

Something in this made him look at her with
suspicion. " You say ' were to have been,' as if
in your heart you had begun to doubt."

" Oh ! " she vaguely protested.

" As if you believed," he went on, " that
nothing will now take place."

She shook her head slowly but rather in
scrutably. " You 're far from my thought."

He continued to look at her. " What then is
the matter withTyou ? "
86

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Well," she said after another wait, " the
matter with me is simply that I 'm more sure
than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but
too well repaid."

They were frankly grave now ; he had got up
from his seat, had turned once more about the
little drawing-room to which, year after year, he
brought his inevitable topic ; in which he had,
as he might have said, tasted their intimate
community with every sauce, where every object
was as familiar to him as the things of his own
house and the very carpets were worn with his
fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-
houses are worn by the elbows of generations of
clerks. The generations of h:s nervous moods
had been at work there, and the place was the
written history of his whole middle life. Under
the impression of what his friend had just said
he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of
these things ; which made him, after a moment,
stop again before her. " Is it possibly that
you 've grown afraid ? "

" Afraid ? " He thought, as she repeated the
word, that his question had made her, a little,
change colour ; so that, lest he should have
touched on a truth, he explained very kindly :
" You remember that that was what you asked
me long ago that first dav at Weatherend."

37

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Oh yes, and you told me you did n't know
that I was to see for myself. We 've said little
about it since, even in so long a time."

" Precisely," Marcher interposed " quite as
if it were too delicate a matter for us to make free
with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure, that
I am afraid. For then," he said, " we should n't,
should we ? quite know what to do."

She had for the time no answer to this question.
" There have been days when I thought you were.
Only, of course," she added, " there have been
days when we have thought almost anything."

" Everything. Oh ! " Marcher softly groaned,
as with a gasp, half spent, at the face, more un
covered just then than it had been for a long
while, of the imagination always with them. It
had always had it's incalculable moments of
glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the
very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they
could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that
rose from the depths of lu's being. All they had
thought, first and last, rolled over him ; the past
seemed to have been reduced to mere barren
speculation. This in fact was what the place had
just struck him as so full of the simplification
of everything but the state of suspense. That
remained only by seeming to hang in the void
surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it
38

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

had been, had lost itself in the desert. " I judge,
however," he continued, " that you see I 'm not
afraid now."

" What I see, as I make it out, is that you 've
achieved something almost unprecedented in the
way of getting used to danger. Living with it so
long and so closely you 've lost your sense of it ;
you know it 's there, but you 're indifferent, and
you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in
the dark. Considering what the danger is," May
Bartram wound up, " I 'm bound to say I don't
think your attitude could well be surpassed."

John Marcher faintly smiled. " It 's heroic ? "

" Certainly call it that."

It was what he would have liked indeed to call
it. " I am then a man of courage ? "

" That 's what you were to show me."

He still, however, wondered. " But does n't
the man of courage know what he 's afraid of
or not afraid of ? I don't know that, you see. I
don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know I 'm
exposed."

" Yes, but exposed how shall I say ? so
directly. So intimately. That 's surely enough."

" Enough to make you feel then as what we
may call the end and the upshot of our watch
that I 'm not afraid ? "

" You 're not afraid. But it is n't," she said

39

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

"the end of our watch. That is it is n't the end
of yours. You 've everything still to see."

" Then why have n't you ? " he asked. He had
had, all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping
something back, and he still had it. As this was
his first impression of that it quite made a date.
The case was the more marked as she did n't at
first answer ; which in turn made him go on.
" You know something I don't." Then his voice,
for that of a man of courage, trembled a little.
" You know what 's to happen." Her silence,
with the face she showed, was almost a confession
it made him sure. " You know, and you 're
afraid to tell me. It 's so bad that you 're afraid
I '11 find out."

All this might be true, for she did look as if,
unexpectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic
line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet
she might, after all, not have worried ; and the
real climax was that he himself, at all events,
need n't. " You '11 never find out."

40

Ill

IT was all to have made, none the less, as I have
said, a date ; which came out in the fact that
again and again, even after long intervals, other
things that passed between them wore in relation
to tliis hour but the character of recalls and results.
Its immediate effect had been indeed rather to
lighten insistence almost to provoke a reaction ;
as if their topic had dropped by its own weight
and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had
been visited by one of his occasional warnings
against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and
very decently on the whole, his consciousness of
the importance of not being selfish, and it was true
that he had never sinned in that direction without
promptly enough trying to press the scales the
other way. He often repaired his fault, the
season permitting, by inviting his friend to
accompany him to the opera ; and it not infre
quently thus happened that, to show he did ii't
wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind,
he was the cause of her appearing there with him
a dozen nights in the month. It even happened

41

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

that, seeing her home at such times, he occasion
ally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the
evening, and, the better to make his point, sat
down to the frugal but always careful little supper
that awaited his pleasure. His point was made,
he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her
on himself ; made for instance, at such hours, when
it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them
familiar with it, they went over passages of the
opera together. It chanced to be on one of these
occasions, however, that he reminded her of her
not having answered a certain question he had
put to her during the talk that had taken place
between them on her last birthday. " What is it
that saves you ? " saved her, he meant, from
that appearance of variation from the usual
human type. If he had practically escaped re
mark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most
important particular, what most men do find
the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a
sort with a woman no better than himself how
had she escaped it, and how could the alliance,
such as it was, since they must suppose it had
been more or less noticed, have failed to make
her rather positively talked about ?

" I never said," May Bartram replied, " that it
had n't made me a good deal talked about."

" Ah well then you 're not * saved.' "
42

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" It has n't been ? question for me. If you 've
had your woman I 've had," she said, " my man."

4i And you mean that makes you all right ? "

Oh it was always as if there were so much to say !
" I don't know why it should n't make me
humanly, which is what we 're speaking of as
right as it makes you."

" I see," Marcher returned. " ' Humanly,' no
doubt, as showing that you 're living for something.
Not, that is, just for me and my secret."

May Bartram smiled. " I don't pretend it
exactly shows that I 'm not living for you. It 's
my intimacy with you that 's in question."

He laughed as he saw what she meant. " Yes,
but since, as you say, I 'm only, so far as people
make out, ordinary, you 're are n't you ? no
more than ordinary either. You help me to pass
for a man like another. So if I am, as I under
stand you, you 're not compromised. Is that
it?"

She had another of her waits, but she spoke
clearly enough. " That 's it. It 's all that con
cerns me to help you to pass for a man like
another."

He was careful to acknowledge the remark
handsomely. " How kind, how beautiful, you
are to me ! How shall I ever repay you ? "

She had her last grave pause, as if there might

43

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

be a choice of ways. But she chose. " By going
on as you are."

It was into this going on as he was that they
relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day
inevitably came for a further sounding of their
depths. These depths, constantly bridged over
by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness
and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat
vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest
of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a
measurement of the abyss. A difference had been
made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she
had all the while not appeared to feel the need
of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that
she did n't dare to express a charge uttered
just before one of the fullest of their later discus
sions ended. It had come up for liim then that
she " knew " something and that what she knew
was bad too bad to tell him. When he had
spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid
he might find it out, her reply had left the matter
too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's
special sensibility, almost too formidable again
to touch. He circled about it at a distance that
alternately narrowed and widened and that still
was n't much affected by the consciousness in him
that there was nothing she could " know," after
all, any better than he did She had no source of
44

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

knowledge he had n't equally except of course
that she might have finer nerves. That was what
women had where they were interested ; they
made out things, where people were concerned,
that the people often could n't have made out for
themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their
imagination, were conductors and revealers, and
the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that
she had given herself so to his case. He felt in
these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt
before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some
catastrophe some catastrophe that yet would n't
at all be the catastrophe : partly because she had
almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more
useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason
of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, co
incident and equally new. It was characteristic
of the inner detachment he had hitherto so
successfully cultivated and to which our whole
account of him is a reference, it was characteristic
that his complications, such as they were, had
never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken
about him, even to the point of making him ask
himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth,
within sight or sound, within touch or reach,
within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thing
that waited.

When the clay came, as come it had to, that his

45

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder
in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a
change and the chill of a shock. He immediately
began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and
above all to think of her peril as the direct menace
for himself of personal privation. This indeed
gave him one of those partial recoveries of equa
nimity that were agreeable to him it showed
him that what was still first in his mind was the
loss she herself might suffer. " What if she should

have to die before knowing, before seeing ? "

It would have been brutal, in the early stages of
her trouble, to put that question to her ; but it
had immediately sounded for him to his own con
cern, and the possibility was what most made him
sorry for her. If she did " know," moreover, in
the sense of her having had some what should
he think ? mystical irresistible light, this would
make the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch
as her original adoption of his own curiosity had
quite become the basis of her life. She had been
living to see what would be to be seen, and it
would quite lacerate her to have to give up before
the accomplishment of the vision. These re
flexions, as I say, quickened his generosity ; yet,
make them as he might, he saw himself, with the
lapse of the period, more and more disconcerted.
It lapsed for him with a strange steady sweep,
46

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, in
dependently of the threat of much inconvenience,
almost the only positive surprise his career, if
career it could be called, had yet offered him.
She kept the house as she had never done ; he had
to go to her to see her she could meet him
nowhere now, though there was scarce a corner
of their loved old London in which she had n't in
the past, at one time or another, done so ; and
he found her always seated by her fire in the deep
old-fashioned chair she was less and less able to
leave. He had been struck one day, after an
absence exceeding his usual measure, with her
suddenly looking much older to him than he had
ever thought of her being ; then he recognised
that the suddenness was all on his side he had
just simply and suddenly noticed. She looked
older because inevitably, after so many years, she
was old, or almost ; which was of course true in
still greater measure of her companion. If she
was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was,
and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his
own, that brought the truth home to him. His
surprises began here ; when once they had begun
they multiplied ; they came rather with a rush :
it was as if, in the oddest way in the world, they
had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster,
for the late afternoon of life, the time at which

47

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

for people in general the unexpected has died
out.

One of them was that he should have caught
himself for he had so done really wondering
if the great accident would take form now as
nothing more than his being condemned to see
this charming woman, this admirable friend,
pass away from him. He had never so unre
servedly qualified her as while confronted in
thought with such a possibility ; in spite of
which there was small doubt for him that as an
answer to his long riddle the mere effacement
of even so fine a feature of his situation would be
an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as
connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity
under the shadow of which his existence could
only become the most grotesques of failures. He
had been far from holding it a failure long as
he had waited for the appearance that was to
make it a success. He had waited for quite
another thing, not for such a thing as that. The
breath of his good faith came short, however, as
he recognised how long he had waited, or how
long at least his companion had. That she, at all
events, might be recorded as having waited in
vain this affected him sharply, and all the more
because of his at first having done little more than
amuse himself with the idea. It grew more grave
48

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state
of mind it produced in him, which he himself
ended by watching as if it had been some definite
disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for
another of his surprises. This conjoined itself still
with another, the really stupefying consciousness
of a question that he would have allowed to shape
itself had he dared. What did everything mean
what, that is, did she mean, she and her vain
waiting and her probable death and the soundless
admonition of it all unless that, at this time of
day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late ?
He had never at any stage of his queer conscious
ness admitted the whisper of such a correction ;
he had never till within these last few months been
so false to his conviction as not to hold that what
was to come to him had time, whether he struck
himself as having it or not. That at last, at last,
he certainly had n't it, to speak of, or had it but
in the scantiest measure such, soon enough, as
things went with him, became the inference with
which his old obsession had to reckon : and tliis
it was not helped to do by the more and more
confirmed appearance that the great vagueness
casting the long shadow in which he had lived had,
to attest itself, almost no margin left. Since it
was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so
it was in Time that his fate was to have acted ;
D 48

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being
young, which was exactly the sense of being stale,
just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak,
he waked up to another matter beside. It all
hung together ; they were subject, he and the
great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law.
When the possibilities themselves had accordingly
turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown
faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that,
and that only, was failure. It would n't have been
failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried,
hanged ; it was failure not to be anything. And
so, hi the dark valley into which his path had
taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a
little as he groped. He did n't care what awful
crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or
what monstrosity he might yet be associated
since he was n't after all too utterly old to suffer
if it would only be decently proportionate to
the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threat
ened presence of it. He had but one desire left
that he should n't have been " sold."

50

IV

THEN it was that, one afternoon, while the spring
of the year was young and new she met all in her
own way his frankest betrayal of these alarms.
He had gone in late to see her, but evening had n't
settled and she was presented to him in that long
fresh light of waning April days which affects us
often with a sadness sharper than the greyest
hours of autumn. The week had been warm,
the spring was supposed to have begun early, and
May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year,
without a fire ; a fact that, to Marcher's sense,
gave the scene of which she formed part a smooth
and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its
immaculate order and cold meaningless cheer,
that it would never see a fire again. Her own
aspect he could scarce have said why inten
sified this note. Almost as white as wax, with
the marks and signs in her face as numerous and
as fine as if they had been etched by a needle,
with soft white draperies relieved by a faded
green scarf on the delicate tone of which the
years had further refined, she was the picture of

51

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

a serene and exquisite but impenetrable sphinx,
whose head, or indeed all whose person, might
have been powdered with silver. She was a
sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds
she might have been a lily too only an artificial
lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept,
without dust or stain, though not exempt from a
slight droop and a complexity of faint creases,
under some clear glass bell. The perfection of
household care, of high polish and finish, always
reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most
as if everything had been wound up, tucked in,
put away, so that she might sit with folded hands
and with nothing more to do. She was " out of
it," to Marcher's vision ; her work was over ; she
communicated with him as across some gulf or
from some island of rest that she had already
reached, and it made him feel strangely abandoned.
Was it or rather was n't it that if for so long
she had been watching with him the answer to
their question must have swum into her ken and
taken on its name, so that her occupation was
verily gone ? He had as much as charged her
with this in saying to her, many months before,
that she even then knew something she was
keeping from him. It was a point he had never
since ventured to press, vaguely fearing as he
did that it might become a difference, perhaps a
52

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

disagreement, between them. He had in this
later time turned nervous, which was what he in
all the other years had never been ; and the
oddity was that his nervousness should have
waited till he had begun to doubt, should have
held off so long as he was sure. There was some
thing, it seemed to him, that the wrong word
would bring down on his head, something that
would so at least ease off his tension. But he
wanted not to speak the wrong word ; that would
make everything ugly. He wanted the knowledge
he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its
own august weight. If she was to forsake him it
was surely for her to take leave. This was why
he did n't directly ask her again what she knew ;
but it was also why, approaching the matter from
another side, he said to her in the course of his
visit : " What do you regard as the very worst
that at this time of day can happen to me ? "

He had asked her that in the past often enough ;
they had, with the odd irregular rhythm of their
intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas about
it and then had seen the ideas washed away by
cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-
sand. It had ever been the mark of their talk
that the oldest allusions in it required but a little
dismissal and reaction to come out again, sound
ing for the hour as new. She could thus at

53

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

present meet his enquiry quite freshly and
patiently. " Oh yes, I Ve repeatedly thought,
only it always seemed to me of old that I could n't
quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful
tilings, between which it was difficult to choose ;
and so must you have done."

" Rather ! I feel now as if I had scarce done
anything else. I appear to myself to have spent
my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things.
A great many of them I ' ve at different times named
to you, but there were others I could n't name,"
" They were too, too dreadful ? "
" Too, too dreadful some of them."
She looked at him a minute, and there came to
him as he met it an inconsequent sense that her
eyes, when one got their full clearness, were still
as beautiful as they had been in youth, only
beautiful with a strange cold light a light that
somehow was a part of the effect, if it was n't
rather a part of the cause, of the pale hard sweet
ness of the season and the hour. " And yet," she
said at last, " there are horrors we Ve mentioned."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such
a figure in such a picture, talk of " horrors," but
she was to do in a few minutes sometlung stranger
yet though even of this he was to take the
full measure but afterwards and the note of it
already trembled. It was, for the matter of that,
54

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

one of the signs that her eyes were having again
the high flicker of their prime. He had to
admit, however, what she said. " Oh yes, there
were times when we did go far." He caught
himself in the act of speaking as if it all were over.
Well, he wished it were ; and the consummation
depended for him clearly more and more on his
friend .

But she had now a soft smile. " Oh far ! "

It was oddly ironic. " Do you mean you 're
prepared to go further ? "

She was frail and ancient and charming as she
continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if
she had lost the thread. " Do you consider that
we went far ? "

" Why I thought it the point you were just
making that we had looked most things in the
face."

" Including each other ? " She still smiled.
" But you 're quite right. We 've had together
great imaginations, often great fears ; but some
of them have been unspoken."

" Then the worst we have n't faced that. I
could face it, I believe, if I knew what you think
it. I feel," he explained, " as if I had lost my
power to conceive such things." And he won
dered if he looked as blank as he sounded. " It 's
spent."

55

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Then why do you assume," she asked, " that
mine is n't ? "

" Because you 've given me signs to the con
trary. It is n't a question for you of conceiving,
imagining, comparing. It is n't a question now
of choosing." At last he came out with it.
" You know something I don't. You 've shown
me that before."

These last words had affected her, he made out
in a moment, exceedingly, and she spoke with
firmness. " I 've shown you, my dear, nothing."

He shook his head. " You can't hide it."

" Oh, oh ! " May Bartram sounded over what
she could n't hide. It was almost a smothered
groan.

" You admitted it months ago, when I spoke
of It to you as of something you were afraid I
should find out. Your answer was that I could n't,
that I would n't, and I don't pretend I have
But you had something therefore in mind, and I
see now how it must have been, how it still is, the
possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled
itself for you as the worst. This," he went on,
" is why I appeal to you. I 'm only afraid of
ignorance to-day I 'm not afraid of knowledge."
And then as for a while she said nothing : " What
makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel
here, in this air and amid these appearances, that
56

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

you 're out of it. You Ve done. You 've had
your experience. You leave me to my fate."

Well, she listened, motionless and white in her
chair, as on a decision to be made, so that her
manner was fairly an avowal, though still, with a
small fine inner stiffness, an imperfect surrender.
" It would be the worst," she finally let herself
say. " I mean the thing I 've never said."

It hushed him a moment. " More monstrous
than all the monstrosities we 've named ? "

" More monstrous. Is n't that what you suffi
ciently express," she asked, " in calling it the
worst ? "

Marcher thought. " Assuredly if you mean,
as I do, something that includes all the loss and
all the shame that are thinkable."

" It would if it should happen," said May
Bartram. " What we 're speaking of, remember,
is only my idea."

" It 's your belief," Marcher returned. " That 's
enough for me. I feel your beliefs are right.
Therefore if, having this one, you give me no
more light on it, you abandon me."

" No, no ! " she repeated. " I 'm with you
don't you see ? still." And as to make it more
vivid to him she rose from her chair a move
ment she seldom risked in these days and
showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her

57

fairness and slimness. " I have n't forsaken
you."

It was really, in its effort against weakness, a
generous assurance, and had the success of the
impulse not, happily, been great, it would have
touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But
the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she
hovered before him, to all the rest of her person,
so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of
youth. He could n't pity her for that ; he could
only take her as she showed as capable even yet
of helping him. It was as if, at the same time,
her light might at any instant go out ; where
fore he must make the most of it. There passed
before him with intensity the three or four things
he wanted most to know ; but the question that
came of itself to his lips really covered the others.
" Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer."

She promptly shook her head. " Never ! "

It confirmed the authority he imputed to her,
and it produced on him an extraordinary effect.
" Well, what's better than that ? Do you call
that the worst ? "

" You think nothing is better ? " she asked.

She seemed to mean something so special that
he again sharply wondered, though still with the
dawn of a prospect of relief. " Why not, if one
does n't know ? " After which, as their eyes, over
58

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened,
and something to his purpose came prodigiously
out of her very face. His own, as he took it in,
suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped
with the force of a perception to which, on the
instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp
filled the air ; then he became articulate. " I see
if I don't suffer ! "

In her own look, however, was doubt. " You
see what ? "

" Why what you mean what you 've always
meant."

She again shook her head. " What I mean
is n't what I 've always meant. It 's different."

" It 's something new ? "

She hung back from it a little. " Something new.
It 's not what you think. I see what you think."

His divination drew breath then ; only her
correction might be wrong. "It is n't that I am
a blockhead ? " he asked between faintness and
grimness. " It is n't that it 's all a mistake ? "

" A mistake ? " she pityingly echoed. That
possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous ;
and if she guaranteed him the immunity from
pain it would accordingly not be what she had in
mind. " Oh no," she declared ; " it 's nothing of
that sort. You 've been right."

Yet he could n't help asking himself if she

59

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

were n't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him.
It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his
history should prove all a platitude. " Are you
telling me the truth, so that I shan't have been a
bigger idiot than I can bear to know ? I have n't
lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted
illusion ? I have n't waited but to see the door
shut in my face ? "

She shook her head again. " However the case
stands that is n't the truth. Whatever the reality,
it is a reality. The door is n't shut. The door 's
open," said May Bartram.

" Then something 's to come ? "

She waited once again, always with her cold
sweet eyes on him. " It 's never too late." She
had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance
between them, and she stood nearer to him, close
to him, a minute, as if still charged with the
unspoken. Her movement might have been for
some finer emphasis of what she was at once
hesitating and deciding to say. He had been
standing by the chimney-piece, flreless and
sparely adorned, a small perfect old French clock
and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all
its furniture ; and her hand grasped the shelf
while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as
for support and encouragement. She only kept
him waiting, however ; that is he only waited.
60

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

It had become suddenly, from her movement and
attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had
something more to give him ; her wasted face
delicately shone with it it glittered almost as
with the white lustre of silver in her expression.
She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in
her face was the truth, and strangely, without
consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was
still in the air, she appeared to present it as
inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment,
made him but gape the more gratefully for her
revelation, so that they continued for some
minutes silent, her face shining at him, her
contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all
kind but all expectant. The end, none the less,
was that what he had expected failed to come to
him. Something else took place instead, which
seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of
her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to
a slow fine shudder, and though he remained
staring though he stared in fact but the harder
turned off and regained her chair. It was the
end of what she had been intending, but it left
him thinking only of that.

" Well, you don't say ? "

She had touched in her passage a bell near the
chimney and had sunk back strangely pale.
** I 'm afraid I 'm too ill."

61

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Too ill to tell me ? " It sprang up sharp
to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she
might die without giving him light. He checked
himself in time from so expressing his question,
but she answered as if she had heard the words.

" Don't you know now ? "

" ' Now ' ? " She had spoken as if some

difference had been made within the moment.
But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was
already with them. " I know nothing." And he
was afterwards to say to himself that he must
have spoken with odious impatience, such an
impatience as to show that, supremely discon
certed, he washed his hands of the whole question.

" Oh ! " said May Bar tram.

" Are you in pain ? " he asked as the woman
went to her.

" No," said May Bartram.

Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if
to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that
appealingly contradicted her ; in spite of which,
however, he showed once more his mystification.
" What then has happened ? "

She was once more, with her companion's help,
on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on
him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and
had reached the door. Yet he waited for her
answer. " What was to," she said.

HE came back the next day, but she was then
unable to see him, and as it was literally the first
time this had occurred in the long stretch of their
acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore,
almost angry or feeling at least that such a
break in their custom was really the beginning of
the end and wandered alone with his thoughts,
especially with the one he was least able to keep
down. She was dying and he would lose her ;
she was dying and his life would end. He stopped
in the Park, into which he had passed, and stared
before him at his recurrent doubt. Away from
her the doubt pressed again ; in her presence he
had believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he
threw himself into the explanation that, nearest
at hand, had most of a miserable warmth for him
and least of a cold torment. She had deceived
him to save him to put him off with something
in which he should be able to rest. What could
the thing that was to happen to him be, after all,
but just this thing that had begun to happen ?
Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude

63

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

that was what he had figured as the Beast in the
Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the
gods. He had had her word for it as he left her
what else on earth could she have meant ? It
was n't a thing of a monstrous order ; not a fate
rare and distinguished ; not a stroke of fortune
that overwhelmed and immortalised ; it had only
the stamp of the common doom. But poor
Marcher at this hour judged the common doom
sufficient. It would serve his turn, and even as
the consummation of infinite waiting he would
bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a
bench in the twilight. He hadn't been a fool.
Something had been, as she had said, to come.
Before he rose indeed it had quite struck him that
the final fact really matched with the long avenue
through which he had had to reach it. As sharing his
suspense and as giving herself all, giving her life, to
bring it to an end, she had come with him every step
of the way. He had lived by her aid, and to leave
her behind would be cruelly, damnably to raiss her.
What could be more overwhelming than that ?

Well, he was to know within the week, for
though she kept him a while at bay, left him
restless and wretched during a series of days on
each of which he asked about her only again to
have to turn away, she ended his trial by receiving
him where she had always received him. Yet she
64

had been brought out at some hazard into the
presence of so many of the things that were,
consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was
scant service left in the gentleness of her mere
desire, all too visible, to check his obsession and
wind up his long trouble. That was clearly what
she wanted ; the one thing more for her own peace
while she could still put out her hand. He was
so affected by her state that, once seated by her
chair, he was moved to let everything go ; it was
she herself therefore who brought him back, took
up again, before she dismissed him, her last word
of the other time. She showed how she wished
to leave their business in order. " I 'm not sure
you understood. You 've nothing to wait for
more. It has come."

Oh how he looked at her ! " Really ? "

" Really."

" The thing that, as you said, was to ? "

" The thing that we began in our youth to
watch for."

Face to face with her once more he believed
her ; it was a claim to which he had so abjectly
little to oppose. " You mean that it has come as
a positive definite occurrence, with a name and a
date ? "

" Positive. Definite. I don't know about the
' name,' but, oh with a date ! "

E 65

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

He found himself again too helplessly at sea.
" But come in the night come and passed me
by?"

May Bartram had her strange faint smile.
" Oh no, it has n't passed you by ! "

" But if I have n't been aware of it and it
has n't touched me ? "

" Ah your not being aware of it " and she
seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this
" your not being aware of it is the strangeness in
the strangeness. It 's the w r onder of the wonder."
She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick
child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the
perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew
that she knew, and the effect on him was of
something co-ordinate, hi its high character, with
the law that had ruled him. It w r as the true
voice of the law ; so on her lips would the law
itself have sounded. " It has touched you," she
went on. " It has done its office. It has made
you all its own."

" So utterly without my knowing it ? "

" So utterly without your knowing it." His
hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her
chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed
her own on it. "It 's enough if / know it."

" Oh ! " he confusedly breathed, as she herself
of late so often had done.
66

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" What I long ago said is true. You '11 never
know now, and I think you ought to be content.
You Ve had it," said May Bartram.

" But had what ? "

" Why what was to have marked you out. The
proof of your law. It has acted. I 'm too glad,"
she then bravely added, " to have been able to
see what it 's not"

He continued to attach his eyes to her, and
with the sense that it was all beyond him, and
that she was too, he would still have sharply
challenged her hadn't he so felt it an abuse of
her weakness to do more than take devoutly
what she gave him, take it hushed as to a revela
tion. If he did speak, it was out of the fore
knowledge of his loneliness to come. " If you 're
glad of what it 's ' not ' it might then have been
worse ? "

She turned her eyes away, she looked straight
before her ; with which after a moment : " Well,
you know our fears."

He wondered. " It 's something then we never
feared ? "

On this slowly she turned to him. " Did we
ever dream, with all our dreams, that we should
sit and talk of it thus ? "

He tried for a little to make out that they had ;
but it was as if their dreams, numberless enough,

67

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

were in solution in some thick cold mist through
which thought lost itself. " It might have been
that we could n't talk."

" Well " she did her best for him " not
from this side. This, you see," she said, " is the
other side."

" I think," poor Marcher returned, " that
all sides are the same to me." Then, how
ever, as she gently shook her head in cor
rection : " We might n't, as it were, have got
across ? "

" To where we are no. We 're here " she
made her weak emphasis.

" And much good does it do us ! " was her
friend's frank comment.

" It does us the good it can. It does us the
good that it is n't here. It 's past. It 's behind,"

said May Bartram. " Before " but her voice

dropped.

He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard
to combat his yearning. She after all told him
nothing but that his light had failed which he

knew well enough without her. " Before ? "

he blankly echoed.

" Before you see, it was always to come. That
kept it present."

" Oh I don't care what comes now ! Besides,"
Marcher added, " it seems to me I liked it better
68

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

present, as you say, than I can like it absent with
your absence."

" Oh mine ! " and her pale hands made light
of it.

" With the absence of everything." He had a
dreadful sense of standing there before her for
so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless
drop was concerned the last time of their life.
It rested on him with a weight he felt he could
scarce bear, and this weight it apparently was
that still pressed out what remained in him of
speakable protest. " I believe you ; but I can't
begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me,
is past ; nothing will pass till I pass myself, which
I pray my stars may be as soon as possible. Say,
however," he added, " that I 've eaten my cake,
as you contend, to the last crumb how can the
thing I 've never felt at all be the thing I was
marked out to feel ? "

She met him perhaps less directly, but she met
him unperturbed. " You take your * feelings '
for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That
was not necessarily to know it."

*' How in the world when what is such
knowledge but suffering ? "

She looked up at him a while in silence. " No
you don't understand."

" I suffer," said John Marcher.

69

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" Don't, don't ! "

" How can I help at least that ? "

" Don't I " May Bartram repeated.

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her
weakness, that he stared an instant stared as
if some light, hitherto hidden, had shimmered
across his vision. Darkness again closed over it,
but the gleam had already become for him an
idea. " Because I have n't the right ? "

" Don't know when you need n't," she merci
fully urged. " You need n't for we should n't."

" Should n't ? " If he could but know what
she meant !

** No it 's too much."

" Too much ? " he still asked but with a mysti
fication that was the next moment of a sudden to
give way. Her words, if they meant something,
affected him in this light the light also of her
wasted face as meaning all, and the sense of
what knowledge had been for herself came over
him with a rush which broke through into a
question. " Is it of that then you 're dying ? "

She but watched him, gravely at first, as to
see, with this, where he was, and she might have
seen something or feared something that moved
her sympathy. " I would live for you still if
I could." Her eyes closed for a little, as if, with
drawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.
70

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

" But I can't ! " she said as she raised them again
to take leave of him.

She could n't indeed, as but too promptly and
sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her
after this that was anything but darkness and
doom. They had parted for ever in that strange
talk ; access to her chamber of pain, rigidly
guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him ; he
was feeling now moreover, in the face of doctors,
nurses, the two or three relatives attracted
doubtless by the presumption of what she had to
" leave," how few were the rights, as they were
called in such cases, that he had to put forward,
and how odd it might even seem that their
intimacy should n't have given him more of them.
The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even
though she had been nothing in such a person's
life. She had been a feature of features in his,
for what else was it to have been so indispensable ?
Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence,
baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he
felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman
might have been, as it were, everything to him,
and it might yet present him in no connexion
that any one seemed held to recognise. If this
was the case in these closing weeks it was the case
more sharply on the occasion of the last offices
rendered, in the great grey London cemetery,

71

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

to what had been mortal, to what had been
precious, in his friend. The concourse at her
grave was not numerous, but he saw himself
treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it
than if there had been a thousand others. He
was in short from this moment face to face with
the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little
by the interest May Bartram had taken in him.
He could n't quite have said what he expected,
but he had n't surely expected this approach to
a double privation. Not only had her interest
failed him, but he seemed to feel himself un
attended and for a reason he could n't seize
by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if
nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved. It
was as if, in the view of society he had not been
markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some
sign or proof of it, and as if none the less his
character could never be affirmed nor the defici
ency ever made up. There were moments as the
weeks went by when he would have liked, by
some almost aggressive act, to take his stand
on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it
might be questioned and his retort, to the relief
of his spirit, so recorded ; but the moments
of an irritation more helpless followed fast
on these, the moments during which, turning
things over with a good conscience but with a
72

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he
ought n't to have begun, so to speak, further
back.

He found himself wondering indeed at many
things, and this last speculation had others to
keep it company. What could he have done,
after all, in her lifetime, without giving them
both, as it were, away ? He could n't have made
known she was watching him, for that would
have published the superstition of the Beast.
This was what closed his mouth now now that
the Jungle had been threshed to vacancy and
that the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too
foolish and too flat ; the difference for him in this
particular, the extinction in his life of the element
of suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him.
He could scarce have said what the effect re
sembled ; the abrupt cessation, the positive
prohibition, of music perhaps, more than any
thing else, in some place all adjusted and all
accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he
could at any rate have conceived lifting the veil
from his image at some moment of the past
(what had he done, after all, if not lift it to her ?)
so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of
the Jungle cleared and confide to them that he
now felt it as safe, would have been not only to
see them listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really

73

to hear himself tell one. What it presently came
to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through
his beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no
breath sounded, where no evil eye seemed to
gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely
looking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely
missing it. He walked about in an existence that
had grown strangely more spacious, and, stopping
fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life
struck him as closer, asked himself yearningly,
wondered secretly and sorely, if it would have
lurked here or there. It would have at all events
sprung ; what was at least complete was his
belief in the truth itself of the assurance given
him. The change from his old sense to his new
was absolute and final : what was to happen had
so absolutely and finally happened that he was
as little able to know a fear for his future as to
know a hope ; so absent in short was any question
of anything still to come. He was to live entirely
with the other question, that of his unidentified
past, that of his having to see his fortune
impenetrably muffled and masked.

The torment of this vision became then his
occupation ; he could n't perhaps have consented
to live but for the possibility of guessing. She
had told him, his friend, not to guess ; she had
forbidden him, so far as he might, to know, and
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

she had even in a sort denied the power in him
to learn : which were so many things, precisely,
to deprive him of rest. It was n't that he wanted,
he argued for fairness, that anything past and
done should repeat itself ; it was only that he
should n't, as an anticlimax, have been taken
sleeping so sound as not to be able to win back by
an effort of thought the lost stuff of consciousness.
He declared to himself at moments that he would
either win it back or have done with consciousness
for ever ; he made this idea his one motive in
fine, made it so much his passion that none other,
to compare with it, seemed ever to have touched
him. The lost stuff of consciousness became thus
for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeas
able father ; he hunted it up and down very much
as if he were knocking at doors and enquiring of
the police. This was the spirit in which, inevit
ably, he set himself to travel ; he started on a
journey that was to be as long as he could make
it ; it danced before him that, as the other side
of the globe could n't possibly have less to say to
him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have
more. Before he quitted London, however, he
made a pilgrimage to May Bartram's grave, took
his way to it through the endless avenues of the
grim suburban necropolis, sought it out in the
wilderness of tombs, and, though he had come

75

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

but for the renewal of the act of farewell, found
himself, when he had at last stood by it, beguiled
into long intensities. He stood for an hour,
powerless to turn away and yet powerless to
penetrate the darkness of death ; fixing with his
eyes her inscribed name and date, beating his
forehead against the fact of the secret they kept,
drawing his breath, while he waited, as if some
sense would hi pity of him rise from the stones.
He kneeled on the stones, however, hi vain ; they
kept what they concealed ; and if the face of the
tomb did become a face for him it was because
her two names became a pair of eyes that did n't
know him. He gave them a last long look, but
no palest light broke.

76

VI

HE stayed away, after this, for a year ; he visited
the depths of Asia, spending himself on scenes of
romantic interest, of superlative sanctity ; but
what was present to him everywhere was that
for a man who had known what he had known
the world was vulgar and vain. The state of
mind in which he had lived for so many years
shone out to him, in reflexion, as a light that
coloured and refined, a light beside which the
glow of the East was garish cheap and thin. The
terrible truth was that he had lost with every
thing else a distinction as well ; the things he
saw could n't help being common when he had
become common to look at them. He was simply
now one of them himself he was in the dust,
without a peg for the sense of difference ; and
there were hours when, before the temples of gods
and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for
nobleness of association to the barely discrimi
nated slab in the London suburb. That had
become for him, and more intensely with time
and distance, his one witness of a past glory. It

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

was all that was left to him for proof or pride, yet
the past glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him
as he thought of it. Small wonder then that he
came back to it on the morrow of his return. He
was drawn there this time as irresistibly as the
other, yet with a confidence, almost, that was
doubtless the effect of the many months that had
elapsed. He had lived, in spite of himself, into
his change of feeling, and in wandering over the
earth had wandered, as might be said, from the
circumference to the centre of his desert. He had
settled to his safety and accepted perforce his
extinction ; figuring to himself, with some colour,
in the likeness of certain little old men he re
membered to have seen, of whom, all meagre and
wizened as they might look, it was related that
they had in their time fought twenty duels or
been loved by ten princesses. They indeed had
been wondrous for others while he was but
wondrous for himself ; which, however, was
exactly the cause of his haste to renew the wonder
by getting back, as he might put it, into his own
presence. That had quickened his steps and
checked his delay. If his visit was prompt it was
because he had been separated so long from the
part of himself that alone he now valued.

It 's accordingly not false to say that he reached
his goal with a certain elation and stood there
78

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

again with a certain assurance. The creature
beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so
that, strangely now, the place had lost for him
its mere blankness of expression. It met him in
mildness not, as before, hi mockery ; it wore
for him the air of conscious greeting that we find,
after absence, in things that have closely belonged
to us and which seem to confess of themselves to
the connexion. The plot of ground, the graven
tablet, the tended flowers affected him so as
belonging to him that he resembled for the hour
a contented landlord reviewing a piece of property.
Whatever had happened well, had happened.
He had not come back this time with the vanity
of that question, his former worrying " What,
what ? " now practically so spent. Yet he would
none the less never again so cut himself off from
the spot ; he would come back to it every month,
for if he did nothing else by its aid he at least held
up his head. It thus grew for him, in the oddest
way, a positive resource ; he carried out his idea
of periodical returns, which took their place at
last among the most inveterate of his habits.
What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that
in his finally so simplified world this garden of
death gave him the few square feet of earth on
which he could still most live. It was as if, being
nothing anywhere else for any one, nothing even

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

for himself, he were just everything here, and if
not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any
witness but John Marcher, then by clear right of
the register that he could scan like an open page.
The open page was the tomb of his friend, and
there were the facts of the past, there the truth of
his life, there the backward reaches in which he
could lose himself. He did this from time to
time with such effect that he seemed to wander
through the old years with his hand in the arm of
a companion who was, in the most extraordinary
manner, his other, his younger self ; and to
wander, which was more extraordinary yet,
round and round a third presence not wander
ing she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning
with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and
whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation.
Thus in short he settled to live feeding all on
the sense that he once had lived, and dependent
on it not alone for a support but for an identity.

It sufficed him in its way for months and the
year elapsed ; it would doubtless even have
carried him further but for an accident, super
ficially slight, which moved him, quite in another
direction, with a force beyond any of his impres
sions of Egypt or of India. It was a thing of the
merest chance the turn, as he afterwards felt,
of a hair, though he was indeed to live to believe
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

that if light had n't come to him in this particular
fashion it would still have come in another. He
was to live to believe this, I say, though he was
not to live, I may not less definitely mention, to
do much else. We allow him at any rate the
benefit of the conviction, struggling up for him at
the end, that, whatever might have happened or
not happened, he would have come round of him
self to the light. The incident of an autumn day
had put the match to the train laid from of old by
his misery. With the light before him he knew
that even of late his ache had only been smothered.
It was strangely drugged, but it throbbed ; at the
touch it began to bleed. And the touch, in the
event, was the face of a fellow-mortal. This face,
one grey afternoon when the leaves were thick in
the alleys, looked into Marcher's own, at the
cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a
blade. He felt it, that is, so deep down that he
winced at the steady thrust. The person who so
mutely assaulted him was a figure he had noticed, on
reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short
distance away, a grave apparently fresh, so that
the emotion of the visitor would probably match
it for frankness. This fact alone forbade further
attention, though during the time he stayed he
remained vaguely conscious of his neighbour, a
middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose
F 81

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

bowed back, among the clustered monuments
and mortuary yews, was constantly presented.
Marcher's theory that these were elements in
contact with which he himself revived, had
suffered, on this occasion, it may be granted, a
marked, an excessive check. The autumn day
was dire for him as none had recently been, and
he rested with a heaviness he had not yet known
on the low stone table that bore May Bartram's
name. He rested without power to move, as if
some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed, had
suddenly been broken for ever. If he could have
done that moment as he wanted he would simply
have stretched himself on the slab that was ready
to take him, treating it as a place prepared to
receive his last sleep. What in all the wide world
had he now to keep awake for ? He stared before
him with the question, and it was then that, as
one of the cemetery walks passed near him, he
caught the shock of the face.

His neighbour at the other grave had with
drawn, as he himself, with force enough in him,
would have done by now, and was advancing
along the path on his way to one of the gates.
This brought him close, and his pace was slow,
so that and all the more as there was a kind of
hunger in his look the two men were for a
minute directly confronted. Marcher knew him
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

at once for one of the deeply stricken a percep
tion so sharp that nothing else in the picture
comparatively lived, neither his dress, his age,
nor his presumable character and class ; nothing
lived but the deep ravage of the features that he
showed. He showed them that was the point ;
he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that
was either a signal for sympathy or, more possibly,
a challenge to an opposed sorrow. He might
already have been aware of our friend, might at
some previous hour have noticed in him the
smooth habit of the scene, with which the state
of his own senses so scantly consorted, and might
thereby have been stirred as by an overt discord.
What Marcher was at all events conscious of was
in the first place that the image of scarred passion
presented to him was conscious too of some
thing that profaned the air ; and in the second
that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the
next moment looking after it, as it went, with
envy. The most extraordinary thing that had
happened to him though he had given that
name to other matters as well took place, after
his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of
this impression. The stranger passed, but the
raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend
wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it
expressed, what injury not to be healed. What

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so
bleed and yet live ?

Something and this reached him with a pang
that he, John Marcher, had n't ; the proof of
which was precisely John Marcher's arid end.
No passion had ever touched him, for this was
what passion meant ; he had survived and
maundered and pined, but where had been his
deep ravage ? The extraordinary thing we speak
of was the sudden rush of the result of this ques
tion. The sight that had just met his eyes named
to him, as in letters of quick flame, something he
had utterly, insanely missed, and what he had
missed made these things a train of fire, made
them mark themselves in an anguish of inward
throbs. He had seen outside of his life, not
learned it within, the way a woman was mourned
when she had been loved for herself : such was
the force of his conviction of the meaning of the
stranger's face, which still flared for him as a
smoky torch. It had n't come to him, the know
ledge, on the wings of experience ; it had brushed
him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect
of chance, the insolence of accident. Now that
the illumination had begun, however, it blazed to
the zenith, and what he presently stood there
gazing at was the sounded void of his life. He
gazed, he drew breath, in pain ; he turned in his
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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

dismay, and, turning, he had before him in
sharper incision than ever the open page of his
story. The name on the table smote him as the
passage of his neighbour had done, and what it
said to him, full in the face, was that she was
what he had missed. This was the awful thought,
the answer to all the past, the vision at the dread
clearness of which he turned as cold as the stone
beneath him. Everything fell together, confessed,
explained, overwhelmed ; leaving him most of all
stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The
fate he had been marked for he had met with a
vengeance he had emptied the cup to the lees ;
he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom
nothing on earth was to have happened. That
was the rare stroke that was his visitation. So
he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the
pieces fitted and fitted. So she had seen it while
he did n't, and so she served at this hour to drive
the truth home. It was the truth, vivid and
monstrous, that all the while he had waited the
wait was itself his portion. This the companion
of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and
she had then offered him the chance to baffle his
doom. One's doom, however, was never baffled,
and on the day she told him his own had come
down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the
escape she offered him.

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THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

The escape would have been to love her ; then,
then he would have lived. She had lived who
could say now with what passion ? since she had
loved him for himself ; whereas he had never
thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him !)
but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her
use. Her spoken words came back to him the
chain stretched and stretched. The Beast had
lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had
sprung ; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold
April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful,
and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen
from her chair to stand before him and let him
imaginably guess. It had sprung as he did n't
guess ; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned
from him, and the mark, by the time he left her,
had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified
his fear and achieved his fate ; he had failed, with
the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of ; and
a moan now rose to his lips as he remembered she
had prayed he might n't know. This horror of
waking this was knowledge, knowledge under
the breath of which the very tears in his eyes
seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less,
he tried to fix it and hold it ; he kept it there
before him so that he might feel the pain. That
at least, belated and bitter, had something of the
taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened
86

him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the
truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been
appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his
life and saw the lurking Beast ; then, while he
looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise,
huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle
him. His eyes darkened it was close ; and,
instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid
it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

DATE DUE

er

Yr

ii P ti f\t i

t NOV

?3 199?

APR 1

71998

U

CR

770 V

FF

052002

u

r n i

1[_ 5 200

\

R R

i

I

-

HIGHSMITH #LO-45102

3 1210 00514 7960

UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY
ill II I II III II III III I II I I II I